Kuniya Nasukawa Livres

This collection of papers centers on phonological strength, showcasing current research across various theoretical frameworks. It demonstrates how strength relations can enhance explanations within phonological grammar. The papers present insightful data from diverse languages, including English, Dutch, German, Greek, Japanese, Bambara, Yuhup, Nivkh, Sesotho, and other Bantu systems. These examples illustrate that strength differences are crucial for analyzing phonological patterns, encompassing segmental asymmetry, language acquisition, pitch accent patterns, and tonal phenomena. Contributors advocate for a phonological approach to strength differences, highlighting how strength-based analyses can be applied within models like Dependency Phonology, Government Phonology, Strict CV Phonology, and Optimality Theory. Many papers offer structural accounts where strength relations reflect asymmetric licensing between representation units. This volume captures contemporary perspectives on phonological strength, indicating that it serves as a unifying thread across various seemingly unrelated patterns and processes in phonology.

This book makes an important contribution to the expanding body of work in generative phonology which aims to reduce the number of traditionally recognized melodic categories in order to achieve a greater degree of restrictiveness. By analyzing data from a large number of different languages, Nasukawa establishes a clear affinity between nasality and voicing, and demonstrates the advantages of treating these two properties as different phonetic manifestations of a single nasal-voice category. The choice of whether to interpret this category as voicing or nasality is determined by the active or inactive status of a complement tier; when active, this complement tier enhances the acoustic image of its head category and is interpreted as voicing. This study deepens our understanding of the typological relation between nasality and voicing, and sheds new light on a number of related agreement phenomena such as nasal harmony, postnasal voicing assimilation, voiced-obstruent voicing assimilation and spontaneous prenasalisation.